Amazing stuff!
"Excavations at a 4th millennium BCE settlement in Iraqi Kurdistan have revealed new clues about the origins of the world's earliest governing institutions, suggesting they emerged partly from their ability to provide large-scale meals, potentially as payment for labor. ...
The excavations at Shakhi Kora uncovered a long sequence of structures spanning several centuries. Over time, the cultural items found at the site shifted from reflecting primarily local traditions to being closely associated with the major ancient city of Uruk in southern Iraq, one of the world's first cities, which featured a large-scale monumental precinct in the later 4th millennium BCE and yielded thousands of clay tablets containing the earliest written texts. ...
However, the eventual abandonment of the final institutional building at Shakhi Kora, without any signs of it being violently destroyed or seemingly facing environmental pressures, points to a deliberate choice by the local community to move away from this centralized system of authority and resource distribution. ..."
From the abstract:
"During the fourth millennium BC, public institutions developed at several large settlements across greater Mesopotamia. These are widely acknowledged as the first cities and states, yet surprisingly little is known about their emergence, functioning and demise. Here, the authors present new evidence of public institutions at the site of Shakhi Kora in the lower Sirwan/upper Diyala river valley of north-east Iraq. A sequence of four Late Chalcolithic institutional households precedes population dispersal and the apparent regional rejection of centralised social forms of organisation that were not then revisited for almost 1500 years."
Figure 2. Aerial view of the 2023 exposure in Area I at Shakhi Kora
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